This invention relates to plural-story building structure, and within such structure, what is referred to herein as a generally planar skin-panel sub-frame which uniquely includes a plural-function, singular-structure, overhead building beam component which, fundamentally, forms a top, tubular, beam-like structural member in that subframe.
In the building of plural-story building structures, there is a continual effort to improve, simplify, and reduce the cost of overall building expense, with substantial focus being directed not only to elements of a main building frame structure per se, but also to other structures, both external and internal which link directly for support with beams and columns in such a main frame structure. A particular area of development which has drawn considerable interest in recent years involves the design and use of various kinds of surfacing structures which become attached in various ways to the outside surfaces of beams and columns to form what might be thought of as the outside skin structure for a building. To this end, a number of different approaches have been proposed, one of which is described and illustrated in recently published, and currently pending, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/818,014, filed Apr. 5, 2004, for “Matrix Frame/Panel Skin Building Structure”. This published patent application, published Oct. 14, 2004, bears U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2004/0200178, and the contents of that application, in terms of its disclosure material, are hereby incorporated herein by reference for the purpose of furnishing useful background material for understanding the construction and utility of the present invention.
In that patent-application described skin-panel system, generally rectangular sub-frames which are effectively modular in nature, and which have been designed to work cooperatively with the specific placements of columns and beams in a main frame structure, are suitably attached in a row-and-column fashion (vertically and horizontally) to the outside surfaces of columns and/or beams, for the purpose of supporting whatever has been chosen to become the specific outside surfacing “skin” of the finished building. The present invention is directed generally to offering certain load-transfer connection improvements in the system described in this published patent application, and in particular, in the manners in which vertically next-adjacent panels become interconnected with one another. The invention also relates importantly to how these panels also are uniquely connected, in most instances, from the outside of a main building frame to inside the frame, and specifically to certain building infrastructure which, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the invention disclosed herein, takes the form of poured-in-place concrete floor structures each of which reside at a different one of the story levels in a plural-story building. In some instances, where columns lie outside the plane where surfacing structure is placed, panel connections to the frame, and if desired directly to inside floor structure, will be routed appropriately differently in a manner to be chosen by the builder.
In the preferred embodiment of the invention, a panel, or sub-frame, of the present invention is intended to be mounted on the outside (as distinguished from an alternative placement inside) of the columns in a building frame in much the manner generally described in the above-referred-to published patent application, and is illustrated herein, though this is no necessary constraint of the invention, to be formed with a panel height which is substantially the same as an integer multiple (illustrated as one (1) herein) of the vertical spacings between stories, or floors, in a building. Thus, a panel, as described herein, essentially extends between two vertically spaced individual floors in a building, with an appropriate height to accomplish this. The panel, or sub-frame, of this invention may be designed to carry various kinds of outside surfacing structures which do not form any part of the present invention.
According to the invention, a main structural member in such a building panel (sub-frame) takes the form of an elongate, hollow, tubular (or like) member which lies at the top of the sub-frame with a horizontal disposition, and which is formed, in accordance with a preferred form of the invention, with two distributed rows of sets of preferably homogenously (or welded in place, if desired) threaded through-bushings (which can include welded-in-place through-bushings), one of which rows faces upwardly, and the other of which rows faces inwardly toward the inside of a building when the associated sub-frame is appropriately mounted on the associated building frame—specifically, on the outer side of that frame. These bushings, which are referred to herein collectively as interconnect-accommodating site structures, are organized into two, upwardly and inwardly facing sets (referred to herein as site-structure sets), and accommodate orthogonally related load-transfer connections (a) between vertically stacked, next-adjacent sub-frames, and (b) for the ends of elongate, lateral-extension rebar, or rebar-like, elements which extend horizontally inwardly and embeddedly into poured concrete floor structure which forms part of the main-frame-supported infrastructure in a building. As will become apparent to those skilled in the art, embedment in poured concrete is, of course, not the only successful manner for establishing structural ties to the ends of rebar, or rebar-like, elements.
The upwardly facing interconnect-accommodating site structures accommodate interfacial connections between the confronting upper and lower edges of vertically next-adjacent sub-frames, and preferably, these interconnections between vertically next-adjacent sub-frames permit a limited amount of in-plane vertical and horizontal relative motions between adjacent panels. Such interfacial connections may be implemented through bolts (specifically illustrated herein), or through elongate, in-plane tongue-and-groove structures (not specifically shown herein). Such bolts and tongue-and-groove structures are also referred to herein as anchoring connector structure.
These and other features, and the attendant advantages, of and offered by the structure of the present invention will become more fully apparent as the description which now follows is read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.
It should be noted that the relative sizes and relationships of various components shown in these figures are not necessarily drawn to scale.